Pigeon Premonitions

It's all about set and setting: there was nothing abnormal about the scene to begin with. A café, spilling onto the sidewalk along with the sunshine, where you stop to have a beer and a croque-monsieur. Nothing more. You’re supposed to be on vacation, accordingly the living is slowed-down and paced easy.

Waiting at the table, at last the glorified grilled-cheese sandwich arrives, surrounded by a heap of golden fries and a pint of Belgian Trippel sparkling in the sun’s rays, diminished little by the awning: looks and smells delicious.

Then you become aware of the Pigeon—nearby on the sidewalk. Filthy street pigeons are not uncommon denizens of any city, but this one is a magnificent specter of disease and deformity. One of its legs is consumed in a bulbous mass of scaly growth, half decayed away and desiccated--its motley feather covering, parti-colored, patchy, and withered. At first timidly nearing the table, you perceive it crawling all about its baldness with movements of nearly imperceptible insects. Its single and enormous eye (as the other is a convex pustule) looks straight at you from a meter’s distance from your seat. Your fork’s approach to the food is paused.

The stare of its One Enormous Eye seems to reproach your meal. It hops to the right. It bobs to the left. It bob-hops with a foul flutter onto the empty and adjacent seat, insinuating its musty and crusty scent into the vicinity of the food. With an aggressive cadence of coo, ruffling its feathers, intensifies its gaze upon you from its One Enormous Eye. As you stare back at it, hyphenated by the bird’s hypnosis, it seems magnified to the proportions of some great Pleistocene beast.

Just a bird.

Although there had been nothing abnormal about the scene to start with, the presence of this pugnacious and truncated mass of pigeon sets an air of miasma and unease over the meal, rendering the croque-monsieur inedible. You slowly move away from the table, and back your way away from the cafe—forgetting to pay the bill; the pigeon is now wallowing in your food, pecking it apart and roosting in it as if it were a nest.

The waiter, meanwhile, runs after you, angrily shaking his fist in the air and yelling at your illegal escape down the street.

Campaign for the Reality of Birds. Take to your plumes for our feathered friends and fiends alike, fit for the most lofty skies as well as the hottest of ovens.